Judge awards $4.1 million in neo-Nazi website lawsuit

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A federal judge awarded a Muslim-American radio host $4.1 million in monetary damages Wednesday after he successfully sued a neo-Nazi website operator who falsely accused him of terrorism.

Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus Jr. agreed to enter a default judgment against Anglin and his company, Moonbase Holdings LLC. Sargus announced the award after a Wednesday morning hearing.

Sargus said he was convinced nothing in Anglin's statements were protected speech under the First Amendment. He also issued an injunction ordering the materials about Obeidallah taken down from the website and forbidding Anglin from discussing them further.

Afterward, Obeidallah praised the ruling and the message it sends to Anglin "and others of that ilk."

"That you're going to be held accountable in our court system if you try to smear people, and try to destroy their reputation because they speak out against your hateful ideology," Obeidallah said.

Among those who testified Wednesday was Andrew Anglin's father, Greg Anglin. Obeidallah's attorneys, who were allowed to subpoena Greg Anglin, have said he previously testified that he helped his son collect and deposit between $100,000 and $150,000 in readers' mailed donations over a five-year period.

Greg Anglin acknowledged helping file paperwork to set up the website and to receiving donations at a post office box. He said he last spoke to his son by phone about two weeks ago but they didn't discuss the lawsuit. Afterward, he declined to talk to a reporter about his son or his whereabouts.

Obeidallah, a comedian and Daily Beast columnist, says Anglin falsely labeled him as the "mastermind" behind a deadly bombing at a concert in England. Obeidallah said he received death threats after Anglin published an article about him in June 2017. His lawsuit alleged the site embedded fabricated messages in the post to make them seem like they had been sent from Obeidallah's Twitter account, tricking readers into believing he took responsibility for the May 2017 terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

Anglin's current whereabouts are a mystery. The Ohio native has said he's lived abroad for years and claims it would be too dangerous for him to travel to the U.S. because he gets credible death threats.

Anglin's site takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. The site includes sections called "Jewish Problem" and "Race War." For months, the site struggled to stay online after Anglin published a post mocking the woman who was killed when a man plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.

Anglin now faces possible default judgments in four federal cases, including separate lawsuits filed by two other targets of his site's online harassment campaigns.